9/27- Marcelle Karp ’23 in Conversation with Matt Brim: “Getting Over Max Cooper”

September 13, 2023 Amanda Rajnauth

The Center for the Study of Women and Society is pleased to present Marcelle Karp ’23 in conversation with Matt Brim for a Book Salon on Marcelle’s novel Getting Over Max Cooper (G.P. Putnam’s Sons 2022). This event will take place on Wednesday, September 27, from 6 – 7:30 PM EDT at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room C197.

Jazz Jacobson, the protagonist of Getting Over Max Cooper, has spent fourteen of her sixteen summers on Fire Island. It’s just an hour from Manhattan but feels like a world away, where Jazz thrives in the absence of the social hierarchies and pressures of high school. Most of all, it’s the place where she’s reunited with her best friend, Macy Whelan. This summer starts out strong when the cute new boy on the island seems to like Jazz (hello, first boyfriend?). But it’s hard to focus on her own crush when Macy’s still obsessing over her hookup from last summer, Max Cooper. Jazz can’t believe how cold and mean Max is to Macy. But when Macy starts to seriously act out, Jazz begins to see that she knows only one side of the story . . . and that she has to help her friend before something terrible happens. Boundaries are crossed and the edge of sanity is tested in Marcelle Karp’s debut novel, which celebrates the complicated dynamics of female friendship and the heartbreaking ache of first love.

Marcelle Karp earned her Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies, right here at the Graduate Center, with Matt Brim as her advisor on her capstone project! She co-founded the zine BUST, is a mentor for women of color at Unlock Her Potential, and she has been, at one point or another, a yoga instructor, a Reiki healer, a stand-up comedy show producer, a published knitting expert, a corporate executive and a creative director. Her Huffington Post article, “I Got Laid Off at 51. It Took Me 6 Years To Find a New Job—Here’s What It Was Like,” explored ageism for the working woman in her fifties. Getting Over Max Cooper is her first work of fiction.

Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His current research explores queer-class relations, including the problems of academic elitism and the unequal distribution of resources across queer higher education. He is the author of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University and James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination, and he is coeditor of Queer Precarities in and Out of Higher Education, Queer Sharing in the Marketized University, and Imagining Queer Methods. Brim is Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, the first university-based LGBTQ research center in the U.S.

For more information and to RSVP, click here: https://bit.ly/CSWSMarcelleKarp

This event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsors: Critical Social/Personality Psychology, the Women’s Studies Quarterly, and the Public Science Project.

Below is the flyer for the talk.